Chris Young recently released NetRecorder, a Ruby library which makes stubbing external web service requests in your tests easier. With it, you can cache and later play back external service responses. That response cache can be easily dropped into a FakeWeb response for use later on.

Back in October, Pat Allen asked for donations to help fun his work on Thinking Sphinx. Thinking Sphinx, if you can't recall , is a Ruby interface for ActiveRecord to the Sphinx search daemon. And, this past Sunday, he wrote up an article covering everything that the community got in return for the investment. He added testing macros, multi-index support, default Sphinx scopes, and more. It's worth a look if you're doing full-text searching in your application.

MailStyle is a library written by Jim Neath which aims to make your CSS-styled HTML emails better accepted across a wider range of email readers. See, there are a lot of mail readers that don't allow for embedded stylesheets or even properly parse page-defined styles into their HTML elements; they often just ignore them all together. So, with MailStyle, you can define a master stylesheet and it will automatically inline all defined and used styles into the HTML email's elements for better reader support. Good rule of thumb: When you think HTML email, think 1995 web browser support.

Creating regular expressions by hand can often become unwieldy and a bit cryptic. The good news, though, is that Jim Weirich recently released a regular expression-building library for Ruby called "re." You can kind of think of re as a DSL for regular expressions, allowing you to build up your expression over multiple statements. This defines the regular expression in smaller, more manageable blocks, which should make their creation much simpler and more maintainable.

Want to know what I'm doing on your site right now? Well, I'm not telling. But, Rackamole and Wackamole by Fernand Galiana just might. They provide you with live data about current usage of your Rack application, including a bit of performance and exception information. It uses MongoDB for it's data storage layer and is largely just a drop in to get going.

The results from Thoughtbot's 2009 Ruby Survey were published last week, giving us a glimpse into the psyche of the Ruby community. And I must say, it's a dark and scary place. 11% of you regularly write HTML-generating methods in your models? 8% use while and for loop calls when enumerables are available? I mean, well, obviously it's not you, but just think.. that's at least one of the next 9 people to load this page!

Previous Episodes

The Ruby Gems Bundler, has_scope, Responders, and LipsiADMIN are covered on this episode of Ruby5. Also, we talk about articles covering PDF generation in the cloud, Twitter Streaming with Web Sockets, and the anniversary of the Rails and Merb merge.